EOSC-hub: integrated services for the European Open Science Cloud

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The EC-funded project EOSC-hub project started on January 1st 2018, bringing together an extensive group of national and international service providers to create the Hub: a central contact point for European researchers and innovators to discover, access, use and reuse a broad spectrum of resources for advanced data-driven research.

The consortium of 100 partners from more than 50 countries will develop the vision of the Hub as the integration and management system of the future European Open Science Cloud. The EOSC-hub project mobilises providers from the EGI Federation, EUDAT CDI, INDIGO-DataCloud and other major European research infrastructures to deliver a common catalogue of research data, services and software for research.

For researchers, this will mean a broader access to services supporting their scientific discovery and collaboration across disciplinary and geographical boundaries.

EOSC-hub will significantly reduce the fragmentation of the IT facilities and digital tools in Europe. By bringing together a broad range of services from general and domain-specific research digital infrastructures under a common integration and operation layer, the EOSC-hub will foster new modes of working for collaborative research to deliver trusted services.

EOSC-hub will liaise closely with OpenAIRE Advance, a project set up to support the Open Access/Open Data mandates in Europe.

Tiziana Ferrari, Technical Director of the EGI Foundation and Project Coordinator, says: “I am thrilled to work for a project that is expected to lower access barriers, tackling issues such as federated identity, harmonization of service access policies, and coordinated service provisioning in Europe and beyond. With the Hub, sharing, using and reusing research data will be easier for research collaborations at all scales.”

Per Öster, Director of Research Infrastructures and Policy at CSC-IT Center for Science and Project Director, says: “Data is now in focus everywhere in research. The vision of the European Open Science Cloud, a capability to share and work with data for all research is very strong. By this project we take the first steps toward federated support of services to realise this vision.”

Giacinto Donvito, Technical Director of INDIGO-DataCloud and Technical Coordinator, says: "In EOSC-hub, we are integrating technological requirements and use cases coming from tens of Scientific Communities to facilitate how science is made, speed up adoption of innovative technologies and improve competitiveness of Europe in the exploitation of distributed data, compute and storage resources.”

More information

The project will bring together hundreds of experts working in a number of intertwined tasks covering strategy, business development, technical coordination and service management, to give a few examples.

Tiziana Ferrari, as EOSC-hub Project Coordinator, will be responsible for the overall project management including administrative and financial management within and across work packages. The Project Management Board, under the coordination of Per Öster, Project Director, will supervise the project strategy and implementation. Giacinto Donvito will lead the Technology Committee, a body created to evolve the project's technical roadmap and supervise the contribution to open source community projects.

The EOSC-hub project (full title: Integrating and managing services for the European Open Science Cloud) will run for 36 months, through to December 2020 with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 777536.